TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY; Technologists Get a Warning and a Plea From One of Their Own

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: March 13, 2000

An unlikely prophet is voicing a plea for reason and restraint in the increasingly chaotic stampede toward the technological future.

Breaking ranks with the customarily optimistic and self-congratulatory high-technology industry, Bill Joy, the chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has issued an impassioned critique of uncontrolled progress in digital, biological and material sciences. He has challenged scientists and engineers to rethink their ethical standards and step back from advances that might ultimately threaten the human species.

In a 20,000-word essay in the April issue of Wired magazine, which goes on sale today, Mr. Joy, a computer industry pioneer and one of the nation's leading technical authorities, writes that although the world has survived any number of potentially devastating technologies developed in the 20th century, several new branches of research pose threats of technological devastation at the hands of a small group or even an individual.

''The 21st century technologies -- genetics, nanotechnology and robotics -- are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses,'' he writes in the article, titled, ''Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.''

''Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups,'' he writes. ''They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.''

Such warnings about unbridled progress are not new, but until now they have typically come from social critics or scientists outside the mainstream.

In contrast, Mr. Joy is a leading computer researcher who developed an early version of the Unix operating system while a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. He helped found Sun Microsystems and more recently has been involved in the development of powerful software technologies like the Java programming language and Jini, a system for linking hundreds of thousands of appliances and other devices by way of the Internet. He also served as co-chairman of a presidential commission on the future of information technology.

Indeed, Mr. Joy also wrote a more generally optimistic cover article titled ''Digital Wonders'' for the March 6 of Fortune magazine. In a telephone interview last week, he said the Fortune piece was focused on short-term issues in the computer industry, while the Wired article addresses long-term forces that will be more difficult to control.

He lives in Aspen, Colo., where he moved in 1989 from Silicon Valley to set up a small laboratory that explores new technologies for Sun, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Joy's critique is striking because computer industry technologists, almost without exception, take a more sanguine view of the social consequences of advances. They typically argue that any negative effects will be far outweighed by the positive effect of new technologies.

Nathan Myhrvold, a physicist who is on leave from his job as the chief technology officer at the Microsoft Corporation, took issue with Mr. Joy. ''People have made apocalyptic predictions about technology constantly for as long as there has been technology. I think it is because change frightens them,'' he said in an e-mail interview. ''Every other 'unprecedented' challenge of the past has been overcome. Is this case really different? Or are we once again falling into the trap of overestimating technology's downside and underestimating people's ability to cope?''

But the new technologies will be more difficult to control in the future, Mr. Joy argues, because most are being driven by the commercial sector, not by the military, which in the past has controlled many potentially dangerous technologies.

Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who founded Thinking Machines Inc., an early supercomputer company. said of Mr. Joy: ''Bill is pretty unusual. There are very few technologists who step back and try to look at the whole picture. Most who do tend toward optimism.''

Mr. Joy argues that advances are now on the horizon in each of the three areas he addresses. In the field of robotics, he warns of a generation of superintelligent machines that could compete with their human creators for resources. Such possibilities have recently been addressed by other technologist-authors, including Ray Kurzweil (''The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence''), Hans Moravec (''Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind'') and George Dyson (''Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence'').

In genetics, Mr. Joy worries that the widening availability of knowledge about powerful genetic engineering will lead to a ''white plague'' -- a human-designed disease that can kill selectively.

In nanotechnology, he describes the increasing possibility of an accidental or intentional release of a submicroscopic self-replicating mechanism that could cause widespread destruction.

Such a calamity was first suggested by Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel ''Cat's Cradle'' a substance called ice-nine sets off a thermal chain reaction that leads to the freezing of the oceans.

''A lot of people have looked at all of this as science fiction, and as a result they haven't taken it seriously,'' Mr. Joy said.